Sunday, December 18, 2016

Popeye Trumpism and the Pitfalls of Authenticity

As disconcerting as the election of Trump was, nothing is
more telling than the fact that authenticity is coming back into the lexicon of
everyday use, courtesy of the populist right and the crypto-rightism of figures
like Alex Jones.When Hillary said she
was two different people in public and in private she might in fact have been
sincere, pointing out a simple truth.In
fact most of us act differently in front of different people. We are a
different person in front of our friends or in front of our parents.The same goes for the public and private
spheres. We not only act differently, we
speak differently without realizing that we do so. That Trump is seen as authentic because he
seems to be the same person everywhere he appears, only shows how perfectly he
plays his part in public.Are we to
assume that President Trump will be the same person as Apprentice Trump, the
boardroom Trump, and the bedroom Trump? I can only surmise that Trump’s
election is taking humanity back, not to when America was still great, but
rather back to the 1930s, when the jargon of authenticity was strongest. Philosophers like Martin Heidegger spent their
waking hours contemplating the simplicity of rural life that on the surface
seemed more authentic than city life and this gave him and the millions of his
readers the tools to proclaim that the strength of 1930s Germany lay in the
hands of the folk, who were at the time mostly poor, mostly right wing, and
mostly without a voice, the exact opposite of the cosmopolitans, artists and
socialites crowding the city centers.Hillary made a big mistake by revealing the truth about her public and
private personas.Ironically in her
moment of authenticity she revealed herself as a fraud which gave Popeye
Trumpism an unforeseen boost.Trump’s
self-made image comes from the age old adage ‘fake it until you make
it’ which is of course grounds for dismissal of all of his supposed authenticity. Trump was always helped along with other
people’s money including his father’s.The fact that he remained staunchly attached to his self-made image
despite the bankruptcies and bailouts of his many enterprises is also telling.
What is authentic about Trump is that he never backed away from the image he
built for himself.The posture of ‘fake
it until you make it’ packages up the falseness of the position one holds in a
tidy veneer of authenticity.If one lies
about being a great and wealthy man when is not, but later becomes one, what
part of his life may be called authentic?Perhaps we need to distinguish between when Trump is being authentic and
when he is being sincere.Oddly enough
the word sincere is largely missing from the lexicon and meme wars going on in
the public sphere and I don’t assume we shall see it anytime soon.